I think Open ISAs such as SPARC, OpenRISC and RISCV and their related ecosystems and tools provide the following opportunities:
-Educational: Engaging more people in hardware design and creating a much bigger community who can understand and design complex systems without the need to start from scratch. Moreover, a larger community leads to the improvements and maturity quicker than propriety solutions.
-Commercial: I agree that they may not be able to compete with proprietary solutions in few applications in near future. However, in many applications the combination of open ISAs and proprietary solution enable faster customization and development time. A good example is NavSpark/Venus (http://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/), a GNSS solution based on Leon3 with an attractive price and competitive features comparable to the state of the art.
-Educational: Engaging more people in hardware design and creating a much bigger community who can understand and design complex systems without the need to start from scratch. Moreover, a larger community leads to the improvements and maturity quicker than propriety solutions.
-Commercial: I agree that they may not be able to compete with proprietary solutions in few applications in near future. However, in many applications the combination of open ISAs and proprietary solution enable faster customization and development time. A good example is NavSpark/Venus (http://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/), a GNSS solution based on Leon3 with an attractive price and competitive features comparable to the state of the art.
-Security: As mentioned by others